If you invest more than 10 seconds of thought in this line of reasoning, its flaws become obvious and it applies to every field in which this argument is made - stories, drugs, software, movies. Compensating creators based on the marginal cost of reproducing their work is not a paradigm for maintaining the flow of creative works.
Maybe you have some junk counterargument that creative people will work for free as well as for material goods. Or who cares about the future, let's distribute what we have now. If you think creative people will work for free just for the joy of creating, then you've never worked on the last 20% of a project which is often not that joyful.
I don’t think they said anything like what you said they said. They said it’s a Wonder.
Like, I don’t think it’s right to spend thousands of lives and decades of time of slave-labor building the Great Pyramids, but it’s absolutely a Wonder, and nobody denies this.
This library project is absolutely a Wonder, however right or wrong you might ultimately believe it to be, and as the poster said, it has been attempted many times and never come anywhere close to this effort.
It eventually still boiled down to some kind of forced labour. Feeding those laborers for decades consumed ressources, which the rulers couldn't just magically conjure out of thin air... so e.g. farmers had to probably suffer from that.
Fair enough. I guess I assumed that in the context of a community that surely appreciates the marvel that is the internet, there was a secondary objective in mentioning it.
Let me explicitly state this, then. I do not care at all if a new movie is never made or a new book is never published. We have multiple lifetimes of quality music already, why do we need to incentivize creations relevant to the modern culture?
I'd like to start from a worldview of abundance and invite you to imagine a future in which we (as a society) will be able to answer a related question: What are the prerequisites for accomplishing the missing, painful 20% of any project out there?
Maybe you have some junk counterargument that creative people will work for free as well as for material goods. Or who cares about the future, let's distribute what we have now. If you think creative people will work for free just for the joy of creating, then you've never worked on the last 20% of a project which is often not that joyful.